Saturday, December 22, 2012
We Are Not Doing Enough To Keep Our Children Safe
Shortly after the September 11th attacks I was talking to The Concierge's uncle and he shared with me his plan to prevent future airplane hijackings. If every passenger were shackled to his or her seat during the flight, with one passenger at a time allowed to be set free to use the bathroom, those horrible attacks never would have happened.
Obviously we all want to be safer, but we have to make sure not to go too far in abridging freedoms in the hope for increased safety.
Benjamin Franklin said "People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both."
While I believe Benjamin Franklin had the right idea, some things have changed in the past 200, 220, 230 years. That's the same way I feel about the Constitution. I believe in the Constitution as the foundation for our land, but I also recognize its limits. In those days they needed the right to have guns to form a militia to protect themselves from an oppressive government.
I think the Constitution is great and we should uphold it as the framework for what we want our country to be. But it has been changed, amended and interpreted many times. And I don't some small curbs on gun possession will take away the right to bear arms as granted in the Second Amendment.
However, if this world were perfect, I would wipe away all the guns, no one can have one for any reason, like the U.K. Property crimes might go up, but murders would go way down, especially mass murders.
But that's not possible here so let's deal with the reality of the situation.
I hate hunting, but I realize some people enjoy it as a hobby. I don't know why killing animals is so much fun for some people, but I was angry when the government took away my hobby (online poker) so I would be the last one to suggest hunters lose their rights.
I have read the stories, and even written about them, when someone has used a firearm to successfully and lawfully defend their home and property and protect their loved ones from someone wishing to do them harm. I'm sure you could find just as many stories, maybe more, of gun accidents, where little kids got killed playing with their fathers' shotguns.
I keep a kosher home. We have two sets of dishes, don't eat meat and milk together, etc. Outside the home I go nuts. I like the chicken parm at Carmine's. I have been known to devour shrimp at weddings. I like lobster and I love bacon. People often ask me (mostly non-kosher jews), "isn't that hypocrital?" The answer might be yes. But the better answer is, if I am unwilling and unable to do everything, should I do nothing, or should I do something?
We will never ever be totally safe. We will never be able to completely take guns away from people. We will never diagnose every mental illness. We will never have an armed guard, trained gunman in every place a gunman enters, and even if we could I still wouldn't feel safe sending my child to a school where a teacher/principal/security guard is strapped.
But that doesn't mean we should do nothing. Maybe we should place limits on certain "assault weapons." Maybe we shouldn't allow civilians to have magazines that can fire so many rounds per minute, like the one the Connecticut shooter used. You want to make those changes, I'm fine with it. Maybe the next deranged killer will murder 20 people, instead of 26. That would be a great way to save 6 lives, but still a horrible way to lose 20.
You want to loosen privacy laws. You want shrinks to be able to alert law enforcement about potentially violent patients. Fine. You want to ban the mentally ill from possessing guns, that's fine with me.
But let's be realistic about what your gun laws will accomplish: very little. The perpetrators of these crimes don't care that murder is illegal, they certainly aren't going to abide by your gun laws. If someone wants to do harm to someone else, they will do it.
You want to ban violent video games, and violent movies and violent song lyrics, go ahead. But again, remember what Benjamin Franklin said.
You may have read this entire post, looking for answers and not found any. Because I don't have any. I have only a thought, that I have harped on many times on this blog: personal responsibility.
When it comes down to it, it is up to the individual. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. It's an oversimplified cliche, but it is true. A gun without a bad person firing it is fairly benign. A bad person, a crazed, psychotic individual without a gun is just going to look for another way to do harm.
By putting the fault for these crimes in the gun, the mental illness, the violent video game or the bully who picked on the killer in 4th grade, we obscure the responsibility of the individual. We allow sick, scared, hopeless people to separate themselves from their actions.
We need to restore personal responsibility in America. What happens to me is because of what I do and what I choose. What I do and the consequences of my actions are mine and mine alone. We need to do that today. And it starts with you. And me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
You had me enthusiastically nodding in agreement for the entire well written and well thought out post, until the end portion about personal responsibility.
Every sane person in this country is blaming Adam Lanza for what he did (and perhaps his gun happy mother for giving him easy access to assault weapons), and I have not heard any rational person blaming anyone but them as the primary cause of this senseless violence.
Oh wait, I forgot, the NRA is blaming video games and movies and the "liberal" concept of gun free zones. I find it laughable that Republicans - and their longtime bedmates the NRA - love to talk about personal responsibility, but when the shit hits the fan, they take none.
I blame Adam Lanza 99% and his mother 1% for this happening. And although the NRA had nothing to do with this specific incident, I blame them for doing everything in their exhaustive power to make guns easily accessible and widely prevalent in this country. So why don't we start with that spineless scumbag Wayne LaPierre standing up and taking some personal responsibility for creating a culture of guns and for making America less of a nation than it can be.
I think we are listening to and hearing different news sources.
Most of the discussion I have heard following this shooting has been about the gun, the type of gun, the size of the clip, etc. And then his mental illness.
But I do blame his mother for raising such a child, failing to get him proper care and failing to secure her weapons.
But I'm also referring to the Jovan Belcher shooting when Jason Whitlock clearly said, and Bob Costas echoed on a grand stage, that if he didn't have a gun they would both be alive today.
That clearly makes it seem like the gun is at fault. As if all we need to do to prevent people from getting killed is to take away their guns.
The problems lie with the individual. The more we tell people they are not blame, society, TV, etc are responsible for their problems, the more we disconnect people from their own actions.
I understand Paul but single murders like Belcher are very different. I entirely agree he would've killed his girlfriend/wife with or without a gun and obviously we can't take away every object that could be used as a weapon by a domestic abuser.
But guns make mass murder easier to accomplish and without them you can hopefully minimize damage. A madman with a knife simply cannot do the same catastrophic damage as can a madman with a semi-automatic or automatic gun. Right around the time of the Lanza shooting, some lunatic in China attacked a school with a knife. Lots of people were stabbed but to my knowledge no one died. If that person had a bullet spraying gun, many would've perished.
I can't disagree with anything you say, I just doubt the efficacy of any of these incremental improvements. I'm not saying we shouldn't take small, easy steps to improve safety, which could potentially minimize the frequency and and scope of these incidents.
I just think we need to look at the root cause, the mentality of people who do things like this. For me, it seems like there has to be a disconnect between actions and consequences.
I was going to post almost the same exact comment as Damino but got sidetracked.
Obviously there is no one cure all. But equally obvious, we should be doing everything we can to try to prevent these massive killings -- gun control, better mental health care, personal responsibility, armed security -- all of it.
To say that we shouldn't even ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines because doing so might not work is totally laughable. if anyone wants to argue that access to such weapons is Constitutionally mandated, bring it on.
Post a Comment